


take your time with me to lose your mind

by meditationonbaal



Category: From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series
Genre: F/M, Gore, Mind Fuck, Violence, foul language (always)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-19
Updated: 2018-02-19
Packaged: 2019-03-21 03:48:12
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,479
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13732497
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meditationonbaal/pseuds/meditationonbaal
Summary: Three days and three nights, like Jesus Christ. Three days of work. Three nights of play.Pre-Straightjacket.





	take your time with me to lose your mind

 

**A/N: Anybody else get Twin Peaks nostalgia watching Straightjacket? Hands down best episode of the entire series, though the pilot is a close second. I’m a sucker for pseudo-bottle episodes.**

**Songs:**

**Mt. Washington by Emily Wells**

**Lullaby by the Cure**

**Hip Priest by the Fall**

**Jesus Doesn’t Want Me For A Sunbeam by Nirvana**

**Wolf at the Door by Radiohead**

**Sister by She Wants Revenge**

**Alive by Adult Video (I’m absolutely smitten with this song.)**

 

 

* * *

 

 

It feels like being drowned when she goes under, a struggle against the current, grappling with a watery reflection, and then sinking helplessly to the bottom. She watches that pinprick of consciousness snuffed out, a star dying against the black of her submerged mind, and slips into the nowhere spaces of her psyche. It feels like being drowned and then it feels like being dead. A nightmare on repeat, emerging gasping for sentience, catching glimpses of reality, a flash of her brother, a glance at a Gecko, and then submersed, relegated back to the upside down.

 

When she is shoved under, her father is there waiting, sullen mouth and anemic blue eyes. He’s sitting on the top of the hill overlooking big sky country, a greasy brown paper bag on the grass next to him torn open and spilling with fries. “Katie-Cakes,” he greets, pats the space next to him, and she notices his wedding ring reclaimed. “Sun’s setting,” he comments as she sits down, and she reaches over to place her hand on his, the skin on the back of his hand soft compared to his calloused palm. She remembers that about him, the dichotomy of his hands, the duality of his sermons, his spirit, old testament and new.

 

Pain pinches behind her eyes, and she squeezes his hand, feels him respond warm, living, loving her. “Daddy, I’m so sorry,” she chokes, but he just offers her fries with a smile that reaches his eyes so blue almost colorless.

 

“No need to rehash the past, sweetheart.” She looks down at the fries, the paper still warm, salt and oil soaked through. They used to do this together, just the two of them. Sometimes Scott had lacrosse practice or her mother a hair appointment, and she and her father would pass the time on the hill, two fools with fries and the world open below them.

 

Her mother used to tell her she had her father’s eyes, his smile, his patience and compassion and none of her. Her mother omitted the part about the backbone, nerve, resilience. She doesn’t know where it came from.

 

“You were always so good at taking punches, daddy, turning the other cheek.” She learned by watching. She died by it, taking that last punch. Her nerve killed her. The muzzle flash reminds her of a camera, and she wonders if there is some karmic snapshot of her deer-in-the-headlights look as the bullet tore through her gut, ripped her nerve in twain. It feels far away, like a dream now.

 

Her father reaches his hand out, cradles her crown and tilts her head towards him. She feels the warm press of his lips to the top of her head, his pause to let her feel the weight of his devotion. “I fear no evil, for You are with me,” he whispers to her. How many times had he fed her courage in the form of verses?

 

“Daddy, I died,” she confesses.

 

He nods, mulls it over with a fry pinched between his fingers. “We’re making it into something of a habit, aren’t we?” He pops the fry in his mouth, chews, and she tries to remember the last time she saw him cleanshaven and dressed for church. Her mother couldn’t stand facial hair, wouldn’t allow him even a peck on the cheek unless his jawline was smooth.

 

“Weren’t we supposed to be the good ones?” This thought tortured her after her mother passed. It continued to ruin her in the months ahead, in that Winnie, at the checkpoint, the Twister, the motels in Mexico and all the fucked-up moments that came afterwards. Nothing ever got better, and for all her prayer jockeying and misplaced good intentions, she felt abandoned not by her father or Scott or the Geckos, but by the only one who ever matter more than the rest combined.

 

“The righteous do not suffer,” her father reminds her, and she hears it the same way he delivered it all those years ago before the congregation, firm, his conviction brilliant. “Though our sufferings are many and constant, God is our stay.” The last part comes out in pieces, though. She can barely see him anymore through the blur, like tears piling up in the eyes.

 

He continues his sermon, but his voice sounds like static. Like something over a radio just outside the frequency range, like the spaces between the channels, and it changes like that, like crossing some invisible boundary in time or space, and her father is gone like the last SOS before an apocalypse. Like blood in water.

 

* * *

 

 

Richie never dreamed, never really. He never considered nightmares dreams, not those imaginings with naïve connotations, sweet dreams, child’s dreams. He was six years old when he realized he would never dream sweetly, that as soon as he closed his eyes, all the big bads would spill out of his noggin, everything latent ugly and violent thing about him simmering to the surface.  

 

As he grew up, he started drawing connections, building a logical network to piece out the origins and causes of his neuroses. Each new violence that twisted him in his sleep, it was a different piece to add, a fresh edge between two corrosive nodes. It happened one day – the final click into place. He tilted his gaze towards that imposing figure, eyes matching, mean mouth resistant but left black and blue by the one child calls God. Each injury a blight on his character and following him in sleep, making a child dream violence, imprinted so deeply on his psyche and savage enough to bear into reality. It made him feel crazy. Barely out of grade school and crazy.

 

It was easier to blame the son of a bitch. Easier than admit there was something wrong with him, and there would have been something off with or without the paternal prick. Screws fall out all the time; the world is an imperfect place.

 

Reaching for the shear line, Richie tap taps the pins with the hook pick, sensing that subtle change as the next tumbler gives and he can move on, keeping the torsion wrench angled just so. “Too slow.” His father bowls him over the head, boxes his ear, and his glasses skitter across the cheap linoleum as his inner ear rings. He reaches for his glasses, but his father is restarting the timer next to his ear, the ticking drowned out by the dog whistle. “You don’t need to see it.” He has a point. Richie picks up the lock again, settles the torsion wrench in the keyway, slips in the hook pick nice and steady, feels for the magic level of each pin, the orientation that will gain him entry. The pulse of the timer doesn’t match the one in his chest, and he has to close his eyes to keep his hands from shaking, to block out his father’s mean mouth curling, itching to crack him. But the plug gives first, and he twists the torsion wrench with relief cut short by his father’s hammer fist coming down to crack him on the nut. He doesn’t see anything for a while after that, his ears still ringing when he comes to on the couch, alone.

 

“Seth?” He pushes himself up, leaves behind a half-dried blotch of blood on the couch cushion and curses. “He’s gonna fucking kill me.”

 

He can hear it from around the corner, his father’s bedroom. _‘Little retard bleeding all over my fucking couch!’_ Bolting for the front door. _‘Get over here, you little shit!’_ But his father gets a hold of the collar of his t-shirt, the cotton stretching, ripping, and his neck yoked by an entire hand, and he feels like a ragdoll wrenched this way and that. _‘Dance, dance, little faggot.’_

 

Richie smooths his fingers along his hairline, the blood still sticky but no split skin. His vision is out of focus, though, everything double floating in his line of sight. He reaches down, his hands scrabbling along the linoleum for his glasses, tripping over the right temple. His brain feels like it is floating in a pool of blood inside his skull, and he knows that it is, that’s what brain’s do, but you’re not supposed to feel it. When he sits back up with his glasses in his hands, they look too big for his face. They don’t look like his glasses at all, but he slides them up the bridge of his nose, the arms snug against his temples, the nosepiece fitted. The world doesn’t look any clearer. 

 

“Dad?” He calls out to the empty apartment. “I’ll clean it up, okay?”

 

When he stands up from the couch, his shoes squish in the carpet, like he is sinking. He looks down and the whole room feels like it is tilting, like those rotating tunnels in haunted houses meant to blow your whole idea of physical reality out the window. _‘We are grounded to the earth by the grace of God,’_ Kate explains, and she looks so much taller, big-sister. Lighter fluid soaking through the leather of his oxfords, itching through his socks, causing his shirt collar to chafe. The strike of a match pinched between index and thumb, her nailbeds pale pink and her face out of focus. Her hand clutches at her gut as all that’s good and true spills out of her. ‘ _We have to make room._ ’

 

He thinks before he goes up in flames, if physical purity is relative, does the same hold true for moral purity?

 

He comes to choking on the flames in his mind and someone is tugging heavy canvas over his head. His glasses are gone. He wonders if culebras can suffocate, drown, survive at the bottom, because he has a pulse, he breathes, his lungs expand and function in all the ways they did before. The ranger’s premonition, _‘You and your brother are gonna hang.’_ And would it be like those poor souls too light their necks don’t break with the fall or too light to strangle quick. His brother is lighter than him. Would he have to hang there listening to Seth suffer hours of the noose until the sun came up and finished the job, lit him up for the last time, leave his brother to worry the rope alone? His mind’s racing, lunging for each comforting thought. Seth is heavier than that – he’ll go quick. Richie will suffer. Culebras don’t die easy; they suffer more for it.

 

His head comes through the top of the straightjacket, and someone has the ends of the sleeves in their hands. He spies an orderly walk past the open door to his cell, some platinum blonde kid that glances back with a big toothy mouth, grins. Fucker looks like a younger Professor Tanner.

 

“Wait.” It comes out in pieces, a simple syllable fractured by fear. The canvas reeks of lighter fluid, and he tells himself it isn’t real. He’s having a nightmare. He was picking locks; his dad hit him too hard. He’s having a nightmare.

 

“Don’t,” and it comes out worse than he intended, pathetic.

 

She hushes him with her too red mouth, too much black around her eyes making them look less like clear jade, more like boa green, and he sees himself in their center bound up, rat in a trap. She is a gory caricature, but when she smiles it’s gentle and kind, offers him a brief reprieve, a simple distraction. Her hands cradling his jawline, and she grazes her lips along his temple, tells him it will be okay, okay. And the word knocks around like rubber in his skull. He strains against the canvas sleeves, but the sun god already has the ends of them wrapped up under his armpits, buckling him in for the remainder of his stay at _Casa de Demente_. “No,” he tries again, and it echoes around her okays, turns over and over on itself like a snake eating its tail, and then he is laughing at himself. It hasn’t even begun, and he’s already losing his shit.

 

Brasa tightens the straps, and Richie wonders if this forced embrace was supposed to be comforting, holding yourself when no one else would, could, like an infant swaddled.

 

“There we go, Richard,” she coos, her palms swiping up over his damp forehead, brushing his hair back. “Worst part’s over. It’s all downhill from here.” She unfolds his glasses and slides them up the bridge of his nose, straightens them.

 

It hits him. “You’re in my head.”

 

“You’re so corruptible,” Amaru preens giddy, scraping her nails along his cheek.

 

“Pot meet kettle.”

 

* * *

 

 

It was the worst thing she ever said to anyone. It was the last thing she ever said to anyone.

 

Sometimes she thinks it sealed her fate, that final curse. Sometimes she thinks she deserves to be here.

 

Hell was not sulfurous stench and thirty-one flavors of physical torment dished out by horned imps in fire. Children believed those things. There was no one-size-fits-all. No, hell was made special, carefully constructed and planned, and that was the point, maximum suffering. Not everyone suffers the same, so why should hell be a common catchall for every subpar plebe that makes it on Satan’s shit list?

 

It’s her house, but the doors never lead where they should. She’s alone sometimes. Sometimes not.

 

She saunters upstairs and finds herself in the parish hall where they’d hold church dances and AA meetings. Her father led the AA meetings, had done so for as long as she could remember. She cannot count how many times he responded to some midnight call to shepherd a lonely drunk home, his compassion so limitless. Kate doesn’t recall a single AA member stopping by to help her father off the bottle after her mother died. She couldn’t fathom it. She wanted to reason it away, that her father was an intensely private man. He suffered alone, and he loathed to pile his suffering on others. He could not lean on anyone besides God, and she knew now how flimsy that pedestal really was. And so, he wouldn’t ask the other recovering alcoholics for help; it just wasn’t in him. But, someone, anyone, just once showing up to give her father a reason to come back, it would have been enough for her.

 

They left Bethel too easily. They disappeared too readily.

 

She walks into her parent’s bedroom but ends up in her own and sighs. She hears the mattress squeaking in Scott’s bedroom through the wall and resists the urge to run back out into the hall. He’s never there, and she wouldn’t want to stumble in on that anyway.

 

“Jesus, kid can really go at it.”

 

She startles, backs up into her bedroom door. Richie’s sitting on the bed, his back to the headboard, long legs stretched out along her twin mattress making it look like a bed fit for a doll. “No judgment,” he amends, throwing up his hands. “I was a teenage boy. It’s our national pastime.” The pace of the mattress springs picks up, and Richie grins, stifles a laugh. She doesn’t think she’s ever heard him laugh before.

 

He thinks something shifty, something lewd, and she’s hoping he doesn’t say it out loud, just keeps it to himself for once. “Did you ever?” he wonders, raises his eyebrows. She grabs one of the beany babies off the shelf, pelts him on the cheek with Seaweed the otter, knocking his glasses askew.

 

“Must have been a little hard, you know,” he reasons, straightening his glasses. He jabs his thumb back behind him at the wooden cross nailed to the wall above her bed. “With God watching and all.” He picks up the stuffed otter, reads the little heart-shaped tag, contemplates its beady eyes. “Or maybe…” He drifts off, smirks to himself self-satisfied. “Hey, come here.” She presses herself back against her bedroom door, hears her brother leave his room and go into the bathroom. Richie holds up the otter with his hand wrapped around its head, the other holding the legs. “Come over here or,” he checks the tag again. “Seaweed eats it.”

 

“My family’s home,” she counters, ready to hide in another room for a while. She doesn’t want to see Richie. She hasn’t even seen Seth yet. And she’s only heard Scott. But, it’s hell. You aren’t supposed to get what you want; you get what you deserve.

 

“We’ll be extra quiet,” he promises, starting to wrench Seaweed the otter apart at the seams. She hears the felt fabric give way, and he’s ready to spill the beans all over her bedspread.

 

“Jesus, Richie, don’t make a mess.” She’s crossing the room, making a grab for the otter, but he holds it just out of reach, grabs her instead and she’s sprawled across his lap. She hears him toss the beany baby over the side of the bed with her cheek flat to the comforter, lily white with pink painted roses. She used to love hiding under this cover with the noontime sunshine full in her window, fluffy and white and soft, like she was in her own little glowing world. She called it cloud nine.

 

“You have an ass meant for spanking,” he announces to the room, and to prove his point, he curves his hand over her rear. “Richie, don’t you dare.” She’s pushes her palms into the mattress, but his arm comes down, feels like a tree trunk on her back. His fingers drag up the hem of her sundress, white against white against white. Then, she sees the sunshine streaming in from the window, and Richie isn’t in flames, but his palm strikes her bare bottom, and her feet kick reflexively, and he laughs. She bites into the comforter to keep from shrieking each time his hand makes contact, knows her father could pass by the room at any moment, and she digs her nails into Richie’s thigh.

 

She finally shrimps her way off his lap, nearly loses her dress in the process, but he relents, leaning back against the headboard satisfied, his hair all messed up from the struggle, top button undone on his shirt. He sneaks one last look at her rare pink ass before she pulls her skirt down, folds her legs up under her bottom throbbing with his handprints. “You’re an asshole.”

 

“It told me to,” he sighs as if it’s all the answer he needs.

 

His hands are draped in his lap, palms up and ruddy from lathering her up. He looks still for once, still all over. She knew he could sit in one place for hours and not move a muscle, but it never meant his thoughts weren’t a chaotic array. When she imagines the inside of his head, she sees a mess of optical fibers pulsing, a few of them fraying and sparking. Only Richie knew the method to his madness. And he’s quiet now, nothing out of the ordinary, but still, she wonders, content.

 

“Look, we match.” He places his palm over the exit wound just below her ribcage. The starchy white of his shirt sucks up all the red, bleeding out on cloud nine. The sundress is gone; she’s in dusty jeans and a threadbare tank top, the clothes she died in. It hits her, she died, hell is other people, and her hell was always going to be Richie Gecko. She hears sweaty flesh gliding over sweaty flesh, smells a thousand bodies writhing in a pit below her, the crack of obsidian against bone and another body tumbling down, meaty thump thumps down the cliff face. Blood roaring in her ears like the sound of waves, and Richie’s fingers are inside her, reaching up under her ribcage, puncturing her diaphragm into her thoracic cavity. And once he has it in his hand, he grabs her by the throat, holds her in place so she can watch it beating, the bloody fist of muscle with a dozen tunnels like mouths gaping, pleading for more. It’ll beat forever now, and the thought torments her.

 

She’s the last body down, thump thumps her way into the fifth circle of hell.

 

* * *

 

 

 

“She wanted to die.”

 

Richie’s gaze flashes up at her, searching her smile for a lie. He can’t tell; he’s blind.

 

She slings her arm across his chest, tilts her temple to rest parallel with his so he cannot see her eyes when she whispers, “She wanted it before that.”

 

“You’re lying,” he grinds out, tries to pull his head away, disconnect. _They called it dissociative something –_ he groans, shakes his head to get it out of him, their words, judgments, ignorant diagnoses.

 

“She was glad,” she intimates, her temple following his. “Glad someone finally pulled the trigger so she wouldn’t have to.” Her thumb massaging the juncture between clavicle and scapula, and he leans into her hold. His lips finding the back of her hand and expecting blood and brimstone, but she still smells like her, like clear green and sweet and soft like vanilla, a warmth underneath it all like damp soil under sunshine – a peach orchard. But there is an undernote of resentment born from a thousand years in a pit mixing with a girl’s naïve longing and it turns his stomach.

 

“Do you believe in hell, Richie?”

 

“Isn’t that where you and your Mad Max friends crawled from? Nothing better to do?”

 

“She wants you there.”

 

He shakes his head, knows that already. _I hope you burn in hell._ “She didn’t mean it.” It sounds more like he is trying to convince himself, though, and Amaru latches onto it, gets her greedy little hands sunk into the beginnings of every fissure.

 

Kate’s hands cover his eyes, and Amaru rends him in two. “We are never more serious than in death, even when we jest.”

 

At the time it didn’t feel like destiny but justice when he knew he was dying in Santanico’s chambers, and all he could think about was leaving Seth behind. One could not exist without the other. Gecko Brothers. There is no thing that can not be, and for all his complaints and dissatisfaction with being second-in-line, he didn’t know who he was without the other. They were a set. Even the universe must know that much. But, he was dying, and he had a choice, and he didn’t care what he became. It couldn’t be any worse than what he already was. Sprawled on the floor of Santanico’s temple, he could admit as much, because death made every petty jealousy and feint at civility null and void.  What would keep Kate from her last confession?

 

“Why didn’t you just go home?”

 

“Home.” It sounds more like a question to a question. She looks at the ground like she is reading a script, her notes on the host. “There was no one there.” He hears Kate, wonders if she’s been listening the whole time, wonders if she’s in on it. “And I thought being with Seth, maybe there was a chance I could get to Scott again. Give him some peace.”

 

Richie scoffs, “Give him some peace. I know what that means.”

 

“No, you don’t.” Her bald-faced antipathy chafes him. “Not really. You probably never will.”

 

* * *

 

She’s been here before.

 

The last thing she remembered before the world faded out was the steady thrum of the pump draining the well and Scott’s hands an insolent pressure on her stomach. ‘ _It had to happen, kid.’_ Hatred comforted her in the dark, cradled her in the deep black nothingness and filled her where she was empty. Hatred followed her back, lit her up from the inside hotter than the high noon sun, and it was not only hers but buffeted by the roar of a thousand others. Life is suffering, she knows. _‘We accept her, one of us.’_ Voices calling each other across the upside down like coyotes calling pack members across the hills. _‘Made the Jonestown Massacre look like a child’s birthday party,’_ she hears someone joke from the fray, morbid jest and mutilated knees but solidarity in suffering. Misery loves company.

 

She woke up wandering in the desert and wondered if whatever was holding her up decided to retreat into her subconsciousness, leave her to deal with their aimless march under the desert sun, let her suffer instead until better conditions presented themselves. “Not much of a team player, are you?”

 

By the time the rangers picked her up, she was delirious and prying apart a barrel cactus with her bare hands, spines nearly inch deep in her forearms. What was initially recognized as heat exhaustion and dehydration eventually bordered on a code grey when she broke the officer-on-duty’s wrist in holding and started babbling in Xibalban.

 

The width of her three middle fingers matches the strokes in blood across the wall. Was it her writing? Was it the santa sangre in deference?

 

This was in the beginning. Whatever thing that had gotten into her hadn’t yet gained full authority, hadn’t learned the right buttons to push, adjusted itself to this fragile person suit. It was a jumble of images, momentary lapses in control where Kate could see clearly again. Coming to and begging an orderly to help her, listen to her. Afternoons in group and searching for the right words, that if she found the perfect way to phrase it, the doors would open. It’s not always easy, grasping for comprehension of what’s happening to her. Sometimes she cannot remember, cannot feel the blood sliding through her gut waiting for its moment. Sometimes she comes to and doesn’t remember dying. _I’m not crazy._ Breaking into consciousness and her wrists wrapped in red ribbons dripping and the blood smeared across the walls screaming, shivering, demanding retribution. Amaru, deliver us.

 

“There you are!” Richie in the doorway, eyes bright, ecstatic. She doesn’t think manic.

 

“Richie, what are you doing here?”

 

He swallows, and she watches the bob of his Adam’s apple. He’s nervous, but he smiles. “She gave me a second chance.”

 

“Jesus, Richie, didn’t your mother ever tell you not to talk to strangers?” A half-joke that sours on the tongue and a half-assed homage to their first meeting. The santa sangre is rubbing off on her. Or it’s him, his stupid grin, everything about him always so off putting.

 

His expression doesn’t change when he tells her his mother was a lot lizard. “Ironic, right?”

 

“What?”

 

His brow pinches, annoyed he should have to explain it. It’s plain as day. “In more ways than one,” he provides, breaking the threshold of her cell. She remembers that about him, in the motel room, the Winnebago, sucking all the air out of the room, taking up too much space. His hands are shaking at his sides; he’s trembling.

 

She backs up towards the bed. There’s nothing to place between them, nothing to buffer the space he’s swallowing up. “Richie, where’s Seth?’

 

His cheek twitches, smothers a sneer. “My brother’s currently unavailable.” He stops advancing, clasps his hands in front of him to keep them from shaking. “Stop trying to change the subject.” It looks like supplication for a moment.

 

“Are we on a subject?”

 

He sees her the same as he did months ago now. God, only months really. She can’t even vote yet. That doesn’t matter. The age of legality, he is sure death nullifies that whole sordid business. “I’m here to atone.” Effortless, he corners her. He likes he can take up so much space, likes that he can trap her with a few sidesteps, become a wall, her hard place.

 

His hand expands across her chest, fingers curling up over her scapula, his thumb directly over the gold cross, pressing it into the dip between her clavicle bones. His eyes are fixed on the space just under her jawline, running across from shoulder to shoulder and back down to where his thumb slides up to place pressure on her jugular. “If I’d just changed you,” he starts, but she finishes, “I’d never forgive you.” She swats his hand away, but he replaces it just as quick, pushes her back against the wall.

 

“Liar, liar.” His other hand finds her waist, his palm laid over where the bullet tore clean through. Both shot in the same place, the same way from behind, through and through.

 

“I said no when I was dying, and I meant it.”

 

“You’re better than I,” he admits easily. She places the flat of her hand against his sternum, tries to push him back, but he leans in, tests her resolve. “That’s what we do, right? I sin. You absolve.”

 

“I don’t forgive you.” It comes out more like an appeal, and his hands are cradling her heart-shaped face, accidentally knocking her skull into the wall. “It’s not up for debate, Richie,” she grinds out, shoves at him, tries to turn her body away, but he presses his hips into hers, pins her to the wall.

 

“You’ll forgive me, because that’s what you do,” he reasons, his forehead to hers, the bridge of his glasses digging into her brow. He nods, hoping she’ll nod with him. When she doesn’t, his hands make her. It was something he never let himself want until she talked to him by the side of the pool, talked to him like a person and not someone who’d just mutilated a bank teller in the motel room fifty feet behind them.  “You’re my endless fount of forgiveness.”

 

“Fuck you, Richie.”

 

“Try again.”

 

“Go fuck yourself.”

 

His grin splits his face. He grinds his forehead into hers with sick laughter bubbling up. “You’re not cooperating, Katie-Cakes.”

 

Her knee makes a connection with his groin, and she boxes his ears at the same time, shoulders him to the side, and he falls on the hospital bed. She’s rounding the bed for the door, but his fingers catch the hem of her cardigan, the fabric snagging and stretching. She twists out of the cardigan, her arms sliding from the sleeves, leaving him clutching the garment empty the prey.

 

She doesn’t make it through the door. She doesn’t cross the threshold. She’s flat on her back, the cheap tile cold, hard against her bare shoulders. Richie burning, hard above her. “Just be cool,” he implores, one hand clasped around her upper arm, pinning it to the ground. His other wrapped around her neck. “You’ll get over it.” Eyes flash yellow and Kate’s scream aborted as he buries his teeth in her throat. She makes a noise like an animal keening, dying, life savagely interrupted. Her tiny palms flat, ineffectual, against his chest; his knees, his thighs, his hips keeping her in place, the control going straight to his dick.

 

_I hope you burn in hell._

 

Gut shot with no more love left to give, and he wants, needs to test that theory.

 

She tastes just how he imagined – fucking peaches and cream. But, she revises the script, upends the whole board game without so much as lifting a finger. It’s a double-edged sword. Getting a taste of all that delicious Katie-Cake filling, it was bound to come with repercussions. He cannot control what comes through on the live feed from her jugular, and what he gets is more than he bargained for.

 

His brother lying on his side in the shit-piece motel bedroom somewhere in BFE Mexico, sleeping off whatever he decided to lace himself with earlier. And Kate mirrors him, her knees knocking Seth’s, her hands enveloping his as if she means for them to pray together, to pray for him. She leans forward, their arms and hands a tangled mess between their sternums like two snakes fucking, and Seth looks like he is in pain. Her lips find his, a light scrape at first. And it was the same with Richie, a light scrape, an unsaid appeal, something in exchange for nothing. And Seth returns the favor like déjà vu, the brothers more alike than they’d care to admit, only Seth takes it one step farther. Seth and the other sex – never afraid to go the extra mile. Seth’s tongue in her mouth, a heady sigh, her knuckles white clutching at his brother.

 

Richie pulls away from her throat. “You’re punishing me,” he mumbles through a mouthful of blood, touches two dumb fingers to the gory mess of his mouth.

 

Kate turns her head to the side, tries to curl up, but he keeps her prostrate on her back. “It hurts.”

 

“No, no, no,” he hushes, his hand spanning her jaw line, smearing blood up on her cheeks. “You see the good in people, Kate. So see the good in me.” His monster mouth on hers, teeth clacking, tongue searching, filling her up with what he just took. And he wants to give it all back. He wants to atone. He needs her to see.

 

His hand reaches for the bridge of his pants. She hears it, the clink of his belt buckle, and every muscle tenses. She wrenches her mouth from his, but he’s already undone the top button of her jeans, his fingers dragging the zipper down. “Richie, Richie, wait.” She curls her hands over his to calm him, the movement mimicking how she held his misguided brother, but she’s his lost lamb now. Kate kisses him; it’s a placating peck. He sighs, losing heat. “Not like this,” she whispers, kisses his bottom lip. She’s breathing hard, each inhale a suppressed whimper, and he studies her exhales, stuttering, excited.

 

“What? You want to do it in a bed? Would that make it special?” he wonders, holding her shoulders, glancing at the hospital cot. He starts to drag her towards the bed by her upper arms, her hip dragging along the linoleum. He bends her over the mattress, tugs her jeans, her pale pink panties down over her hips. Her palm digs into his hip, pressing back while he urges forward, fitting just right in the cleft of her peach of an ass. His fingers skim the lace of her camisole, peels the thin fabric up the length of her back and presses kisses to the rungs of her spine as he goes.

 

“Richie, stop.”

 

He’s surprised it took this long, really. If he had followed the natural rhythm of things then, this wouldn’t feel so rushed, like a patched-up job. If he’d worked harder by the pool, laid the foundation better in the Winnebago, by the time they’d gotten to the Twister he might have had her begging for it in the back room, his hand down the front of her jeans and stroking her into oblivion while his brother and her familiars got drunk and mesmerized by Santanico on their own.

 

He felt it then. It was always her, just a different package. _Set me free_.

 

Amaru is sitting across from him. He’s holding himself against his will, arms wrapped up around his torso and sporting a hard on and alone with the devil. Kate’s begging in the back of his mind, and Amaru drinks up the despair on his face.

 

* * *

 

 

She takes a seat in his lap, her favorite place to perch these last few days. She wriggles to get comfortable, and the heavy canvas scrapes against leather, the sound grinding in his ears. Her hands spread over his knees as if settling into her throne, holding court before the crazies real and imagined. “Remember what I showed you, Richard?” His left hand burns under the restraints. His shoulders strain against the straightjacket sleeves, the buckles taut along his shoulders, creaking.

 

“The things you’ve done, all for a reason,” she reveals. “Preparation.”

 

He bites. “Preparation for what?”

 

She asks him again. “Do you believe in hell, Richie?” When he doesn’t answer, she tries a different tack. “Well, do you believe in heaven?”

 

“Fairytale bullshit,” he whispers.

 

She raises her legs and swivels, drapes her knees over his thigh and leans back against the chair arm. “Richie, what do you think comes after for someone like you?” He closes his eyes, smiles, shakes his head. She’s belaboring a subject he’s been bored with since Catholic school. “How could a cretin like Malvado gain entre into a place as exclusive as El Rey? Why was the price something so steep, so cruel? Why was the price of heaven something so hellish?” She catches the cogs and gears turning in his head, can practically hear the screws stripping, falling loose. _‘Even the worst of men are wished the best in death.’_ “Given the right perspective, anyone can make a heaven of hell.”

 

“You must have been so disappointed.” Misdirection. “You were hoping to come out on top, finally, get what you were promised. You were thinking you’d finally found it, your home, your place in the world. And isn’t that just your luck. You thought it was love. It felt like it. It was the closest you’d come to it.

 

“But, she couldn’t be kept. Sometimes she couldn’t even be touched. That’s what you wanted, though. You wanted someone to keep. Ownership. Control. You wanted to be on top. Living your life under thumbs.” She presses the pad of her thumb in the middle of his forehead, directly over the frontal suture and tests the give. “Your father.” Jab. “Your uncle.” Jab. “Seth, Santanico.” Each name an offense against his skull. “I’m here to give you what you want, Richie.

 

“It’s a simple exchange, Richie,” she reasons, her palm warm along his jawline. “You give me what I want, and I’ll do the same. All I want is to be whole again. And once I do that, get back into my own skin, you can have her back. You can have all of her back. You help me; I’ll give you what you really wanted,” she promises, her lips grazing his ear lobe. In the periphery, he can see lucid green, a virtuous mouth, a weak jaw ending in the point of a heart, and it’s an ache just below his sternum, an itch in his left palm, a bid for forgiveness on the tip of his tongue to just see her again, real and alive and – his.

 

“A keepsake for you, Richie,” she whispers. “A promise.” Slipping her cross into his front pocket. “Payment upon receipt.”

 

_Remember what I showed you?_

 

Xibalba and El Rey – one in the same.


End file.
